One useless computer‚ no internet‚ no accounts‚ a broken photocopier and hardly any members.

That’s the dismal state of the ANC’s critical Dullah Omar region‚ which is tasked with leading the campaign against the DA’s growing stranglehold on power in the Western Cape.

The revelations are made in a report by a task team sent into the region‚ which covers the Cape Town metro‚ after its leadership was disbanded in June.

“The office has no decent working computers … the reception has a very old computer which is completely useless‚” reads the report.

“There is one big broken photocopier/printer that is not working. The office depends on two small printers.”

So bad is the state of the region‚ the report says‚ that it has only 13‚ 063 members in good standing out of a population of 3.7 million.

As for money‚ it depends on a R104‚000 monthly council grant‚ supplemented by fines councillors have to pay when they miss council meetings.

“There are no financial records at the regional office. The (task team) was told that the financial records were kept at the regional treasurer’s house and the region had not been audited for approximately two terms of office‚” says the report.

The region had failed to table a financial report at its last conference.

Task team leader Leonard Ramatlakane confirmed on Saturday that a report had been handed to provincial secretary Faiez Jacobs‚ but he declined to comment on its contents.

Jacobs said the report would be tabled at the next provincial executive committee meeting. “It’s an internal matter … I won’t comment on it‚” he said.

Dullah Omar chairman Xolani Sotashe dismissed the report as the work of an embittered faction. “How do you operate while a structure that has been disbanded has appealed? Because in any process of appeal‚ everything stops until the appeal is resolved‚” he said.

He said regional secretary JJ Tyhalisisu would have to comment on the report’s claims about the state of the regional office in Salt River. “All I know is that we have never experienced any communication problems between the structures of the ANC‚” he said.

“He [Tyhalisisu] operates from that office‚ he receives emails and then he sends emails and he does everything in that office.”

Tyhalisisu said he could not comment on a report he had not seen.

* The family of late justice minister Dullah Omar asked the pro-Zuma ANC region on Friday to change its name. “It would have troubled and hurt him deeply that his name be associated with anything but the defence and advancement of the founding values of the ANC and the principles of our constitutional democracy‚” said Omar’s sister‚ Latifa.

[Source: Times Live]